Thursday, November 23, 2017

Elijah Hixson discovers lost text in Codex Bezae

At SBL this week, Elijah Hixson presented his discovery of lost text in Codex Bezae. The full research is forthcoming in New Testament Studies, but you can read about how Elijah found the missing text at the Cambridge special collections blog.

Here’s a snippet explaining how Elijah made the discovery.

Samuel P. Tregelles noted that although there was no visible writing [in Gregory-Aland 33/Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, gr. 14) where there should have been, the text was not completely lost. It was just in the wrong place: on the opposite page, backwards. The damp storage conditions had caused the pages to stick together. When they were pulled apart, the ink often adhered to the facing page.

The same phenomenon occurs in Codex Bezae. In at least one place, a few letters from the Greek side have stuck – backwards – to the facing page of Latin text. What is significant, however, is that in this one place, the Greek page was subsequently lost. We have no record of what this page looked like or what Greek text it contained. Thanks to the wonderful images of Codex Bezae on the Cambridge University Digital Library, it is possible to work with the images in photo-editing software to recover some of the lost text.

Here is one example:

Reversed ink in Bezae 455r

Fantastic work on this, Elijah. As he said in his paper, even the most studied manuscripts still have secrets to reveal to those willing to look carefully enough.